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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27232867">The Human</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/petriganda/pseuds/petriganda'>petriganda</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Adventure Time</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Character Study, Drabble, Gen, One Shot, POV Second Person, thinking about finn and humanity and oof ouch, word vomit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-10-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-10-27</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 21:48:48</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,430</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27232867</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/petriganda/pseuds/petriganda</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>At three o'clock in the morning, Finn ponders his humanity. (You should probably read the last 2 season 11 comics first for context)</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Finn The Human &amp; Marceline, Finn the Human &amp; Jake the Dog</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>33</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Human</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>no cw that i can think of but this is purely just me going off at a piece of paper. i think about finn too much.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>You lay on your back in the dark, tracing the lines in the wood of the newly built ceiling with your pupils. You're unsure of the time, but it's dark and it's been dark for awhile. The crickets sound louder here than they ever could at the treehouse, and the moonlight falls over your eyes from the window. Jake mumbles in his sleep as normal, BMO's screen casts a faint blue light on the floor as they sit with their back to the wall, charging. Sometimes, if you listen just a little too carefully, you can even hear Shelby snoring quietly. NEPTR had gone touring with Flame Princess, but beyond that, the cabin felt perfectly like home. The familiarity of the atmosphere overwrote the fact that you hadn't quite broken into the new house yet. It would, like anything else, take some time, but that wasn't what was keeping you awake. You were counting your fingers on your hands, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Simon had five fingers, so did Betty. Susan and your parents had four, just like you. You couldn't decide if that was a natural division in your species or if Betty and Simon were just really old. Spending as much time as you did around Marceline and the princess sort of took away from just how vast a thousand years was to you. You forgot that in that time the planet could shift, entire species could die off, and apparently, humans could lose their fifth fingers. You supposed you could ask your mother, but that would require visiting the human colony. You had sworn the place off and rightfully so. They lied to you, and frankly, they freaked you out. They were so </span>
  <em>
    <span>different </span>
  </em>
  <span>from the people in Marceline's movies, they were different from the descriptions of humanity you'd gotten from books and video games.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Humanity didn't make any sense to you. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>You had two windows into it, one modern and one of a thousand years. Talking to your mother meant visiting the human colony, whereas Simon, though allowed past its gates, kept away from it in solidarity. Though you had walked and lived through modern human civilization, you were a product of it, you felt more familiar, closer to how it was before the bombs fell. You had been the last human for the first fifteen years of your life, the only point of reference you'd ever had for your own kind were the artifacts you'd find scattered in caves and deserts and lakes or the way the world looked in Marceline's movies. Finn the Human was such a lonely moniker to bear. You didn't really think much about it until you were seeing other humans, though they were always through screens and photographs. Now that you were older, the isolation that title brought pressed deeper. You had met humanity, but you felt like a foreigner. The humans you came from seemed like aliens almost, and though you looked like them you still felt of a different kind. They didn't feel like humans to you, or perhaps you didn't feel like a human yourself. </span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>You weighed your first encounter with humanity. Wasn't Marceline human once? At least half. That still counted for something, right? She was born to a human mother and raised by a human man in the remains of a human world. Humanity wasn't skin deep, or at least that's what you believed. Your mother was a program but still considered herself a human. Dr. Gross was mostly metal and wires but saw herself as a human as well. If they could be human, couldn't Marceline? What about Susan? You had tried to put the things they'd done to her out of your mind, but you always came back to it. They changed her, but you had always considered her the first human besides yourself you'd ever met. On a superficial level, that was still true, but if you added nuance you had encountered humanity long before Susan. You were six when your father- Joshua, that is- volunteered to rescue Princess Bubblegum from the neighboring Ice Kingdom. You were seven when he died, and eleven when you had to rescue her yourself for the first time, when you first encountered the Ice King. He had just been another one of the Candy Kingdom’s enemies for years. You'd brushed Simon's tapes off at first, but they had admittedly kept you awake wondering. Did that mean Ice King was still human? He had to have been to at least some degree, right? He was the only wizard you'd ever fought to bleed red, and heaven knows you've fought plenty. What about Betty when she was saddled with Magic Man's powers? She'd certainly looked human. Peppermint Butler told you humans had a low tolerance for magic, that it changed them and so they got rid of it. When they were gone, it returned.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>And what about Fern? You still wept for Fern in the quieter moments, when you thought nobody was listening. What happened to Fern wasn’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>fair. </span>
  </em>
  <span>Fern was you, and like you, he had always been the last human. He held your memories and your love, his family was yours and he couldn’t have them. They wouldn’t take him. What if Minerva had met him? She was his mother like she was yours, and though he had rightfully declared himself human, he was still made from weeds and flowers. Was he still human on the inside? Was he built the same way as you, with grass rather than flesh? But he didn’t breathe. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t be built the same as you.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Perhaps trying to figure this out was a fool's errand. It didn't matter what you were. You knew who you loved and who loved you. Family slept around you in a decrepit dresser drawer, an aging viola, and plugged into an outlet on the wall. Family was the smell of bubblegum mixed with disinfectant, sharp nails carefully strumming a bass guitar, and the sun's glare on old glasses lenses. You had been through a lot and if meeting your mother made you aware of anything it was that you were, ultimately, still just a child, and like a child, you weren't sure of much, but the one thing you had become absolutely certain of was that family did not know humanity. Family did not know genes, family did not know birth, and if it's meant to be, family always finds each other.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>You knew </span>
  <em>
    <span>subconsciously</span>
  </em>
  <span> that Minerva and Martin had to have held you in their arms at some point, but the idea of that was unreachable. To this very day, you could still feel Margaret's stiff fur on your skin and her lips on your forehead. You could remember Joshua's paws on your wrists as you took your first steps and as you swung your first sword. You didn't know how Martin felt about you, and frankly, you didn't have the energy to care, but you knew Minerva loved you. She loved you and she looked exactly like you, and that stirred such complicated feelings. Your mother was Margaret. Though she needed you, you didn't need or really have room for Minerva and that made your guts feel rotten. Fate had made Joshua and Margaret your parents and Jake and Jermaine your brothers. Fate had given you BMO and Shelby and Marceline and Bonnie and Simon, fate had given you the most loving and amazing family you could ask for, but what had fate left for Minerva? She lost her only child, the man she loved, and even her own </span>
  <em>
    <span>body</span>
  </em>
  <span>. Fate wasn't always just, you knew this, but it made you angry that it had done Minerva like that. But then, if that hadn't happened to her, you would have grown up on that stupid island. You would have </span>
  <em>
    <span>died </span>
  </em>
  <span>on that stupid island.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>You would have lived and died among other humans, and there was nothing you were more conflicted about than humanity.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>Thus the train of thought has gone in a full circle.</span>
</p><p> </p><p>
  <span>The sky has begun to lighten. The crickets have given way to chirping birds, and dew has settled on the window. It's fall again, so the trees are looking a little browner than they did a week ago. Bonnie had tried to explain why leaves changed color like that, but you of course hadn't been listening. You closed your eyes, finally giving into sleep. You knew you would fall back into these thoughts the next time you went to bed.</span>
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